Our summer has been really weird this year….either cooler then it should be, or waaaayyy hotter then it should be…no nice balmy summer days and night.
Its like Mother Nature is having fun turning the heating switch up to full blast every couple of weeks and watching us all wilt…humans, animals and plants…
And now we are now experiencing another run of high temperatures….thankfully not quite as hot as the four days or so over 41C we had a little while ago…but not much better.
I have lived through the droughts we have experienced here in the city. I remember as a kid going out into the garden to help my parents water the garden in the early evening before restrictions.
And then as I got older, and had my own garden, the drought continued on for so long that it was a case of just letting go of whatever didn’t survive….water was too precious to waste.
Tanks became a necessity…but sometimes there was no rain to fill them up.
And I am only talking from a city dwellers point of view…the effect of drought on the country areas is horrifying….
Long gone are the days of sprinklers sitting in the middle of a green lawn in the sunshine, pumping the water out…
I used to love going to sleep at my grandparents beach house, with the tic, tic, tic of the large sprinkler….it was a favourite sound of summer.
But this summer is different…its not so much the lack of water…we are not currently under drought conditions here…its the extreme heat that keeps coming…
I don’t remember anything like this in previous summers…
An example of how hot it has got…my parents have a weather station with a temperature gauge in the shade…it reached 47.7C a few weeks ago…in the SHADE!
This is when you feel like you have walked into a furnace when you brave going outside….
Our garden looks like someone has gone along with a blow torch and just scorched all the leaves….I just went and took these images…it is currently about 5.30pm…and it is 40C!
This is our magnolia tree….
Our lemon tree which unfortunately gets the brunt of the sun in the late afternoon, is curling its leaves up and dropping all its golf ball size lemons…
Some of the trees in our usually shady suburb are dropping all their leaves due to stress…its like autumn…in February!
The lawn…well you can see whats happened there…and yes, it is crunchy to walk on..
The difference with this summer is that this damage is not through lack of water…we have a tank …but the extreme heat…
So as we hunker down in the coolest places we can find, the summer heatwaves roll on….